Old Holden Roberto can't get over it. Tonight, in Luanda, he has seen, with his own eyes, a truck full of Cubans and Soviets pass by beneath the windows of his house. My obvious surprise, my exclamations, are of no use. In vain I explain to him that the Cubans left Angola ten years ago and that the rare few that stayed have become dentists on the Marginal.
He insists. Almost gets angry. And now this former fighter for the war of independence, this party leader, who has become, with time, this little gentle-looking man, with the cautious and conciliatory manners, with impeccably coiffed white hair, launches into a strange speech in which his glorious past is mixed up with hallucinations of the present: a jumbled confusion of insurrection against the Portuguese; the war, almost immediately afterwards, against the Marxists of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola MPLA , who are victorious and oust him from power; Sartre on Capri; Fanon, who was a friend of his; and then that dark story of the Cubans, his enemies from long ago, he is sure he sees them returning, on certain nights, like ghosts, to the city.
You'll see. They aren't given anything to eat. Nothing to drink. So they climb over the wall, the poor madmen. They pass through the camp's barbed wire.
They turn up in the middle of the city, naked, incoherent, rummaging through trashcans. And that's what the Cubans are doing. And that's why they're combing the neighborhoods. They're hunting down the madmen of Futungo and killing them with a bullet in the head from a silencer.
At which point he again changes register and, quite calmly, solemnly, with a trace of pride, takes out of his pocket that day's edition of the Journal of Angola where he shows me, in a corner of an inside page, a tiny article entitled "El grido des vielho" -"The Cry of the Old Man"-which calls for an end to hostilities. I am the "old man," he says apologetically.
